Wahari is the central culture-hero of Piaroa religion, the demiurge who shaped the dry land, raised its hills and rivers, gave form to the forest animals, and brought the Piaroa themselves into existence. He is the master of songs, holder of the chanted knowledge (menye) and of the hallucinogenic snuff yopo and the vine caapi, whose visionary sight underwrites all later shamanic practice. His mythology is deeply ambivalent: though he is a maker of worlds, he is also proud, appetitive and fallible, and the tales dwell on his transgressions, including in some tellings an incestuous desire for his sister. He stands in lifelong contest with the water-lord Kuemoi, who is at once his mother's brother and his father-in-law, a rivalry through which the dangerous powers of culture pass between land and water. At the close of the creation age Wahari is destroyed, and his person is thereafter bound to the tapir, the great land animal in which the vanished god endures. The Warime festival, with its hidden flutes and masked dancers, renews the fertility of game and re-enacts his deeds.